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I feel like an apple user happy with incremental updates (only they pay $700 odd, I only paid $42)... but I'll have an original, an original with mounting holes, and now a 512 meg version... What'll you give me for the complete set?:P

Just like with SSDs, early ones were still faster than spinning rust, but horrifically unreliable. If you were someone who wanted the bleeding edge you still bought them, but for people who value reliability, we waited for the later models to come out.

I know I said in the past that I would buy one when Western Digital started making them, but the fact that Intel has a 5 year warranty on their SSDs now for awhile and the specs of the new 520 series I went ahead and got one. Combine that with finally liste

I know I said in the past that I would buy one when Western Digital started making them

I know, I'm waiting for Boeing to start making automobiles. Toyotas just aren't reliable enough;p

Sorry, I just couldn't resist. I personally think you are better off with an Intel SSD, since intel has experience with chips. WD might know how to make a good spinning disk, but AFAIK they don't own a single chip fab.

Ummmmmm, your analogy is a non sequitur. Boeing has never made cars. Western digital does make storage devices, so getting into SSD would be a logical step for them. You example would be logically coherent if you replaced "car" with "single engine prop planes", but even that's a stretch since SSDs are a growing market share while single engine prop planes are a rather mature market.

Nvidia doesn't own a single chip fab either, what does that have to do with anything?

Nvidia doesn't own a single chip fab either, what does that have to do with anything?

Nvidia at least designs their own graphics chips. If WD has any chip design experience at all, it is in their drive controller. And I'm sure some of that experience applies to SSDs, but they have no memory chip experience at all.

Ummmmmm, your analogy is a non sequitur. Boeing has never made cars. Western digital does make storage devices, so getting into SSD would be a logical step for them.

I don't feel it's actually that big of a stretch. Western Digital is and never has been a player in the flash-storage market, they've always been a player in the mechanical storage - market, just Boeing has always been about transporting people through the air instead of on the ground. Boeing does have experience with developing lightweight, sturdy structures with passenger safety and aerodynamics/fuel efficiency in mind just as WD has experience with error-correction, data usage patterns and such details;

I've been buying them and sticking them into the SAS slots on HP DL360/DL380 servers. They snap right in. I bought about 25% more than I need in case there are any failures and will proactively rotate them out for newer/larger ones in a year.

I have my slice of Pi. And I am quite satisfied with 256Mb. I have plans for the little beast that don't require more RAM.... So I am happy. I liked the idea of a cheap limited computer. It makes you frugal with your resources and efficient. But then again if my ZX81 still worked, I'd be playing with that...

Finally, for the same actual delivered price, you can get something else. For barely more you can get a VIA APC from Newegg. For the same price, you can get one of these sticks that run ICS.

You do realize that those do not offer the same kind of modifiability as the RPi? The VIA APC has very few extra ports and the sticks have literally none. In other words, they cater to entirely different audience and if you bought an RPi but actually wanted a VIA APC or similar then you hadn't really thought about what you actually want. Yes, it is sad that the RPi doesn't seem to suit you, but blaming them for that is just shifting blame for your bad purchase from yourself.

the memory upgrade had to be coming but they didn't want people to wait so they didn't tell us.

Why "bad news"? This is an excellent opportunity to get a second one...and give the original to someone who would appreciate it as a Christmas gift. Which is what I plan on doing...and it means ModMyPi will be getting more business, too, as I get another case for the new one.

this is true but i didnt cancelmy order with RS because i live on a tiny rock in the middle of the ocean and they offered a cheap shipping rate even though they are from the UK and im actually closer to the US whereas the other guys (farnell) that are US based wanted around $45-50 dollars to ship... which is more than the cost of the device itself.

the other thing is that i bought it jsut to play around with and not for any particular need so i dont really mind waiting. (hopefully should be here soon sinc

You are correct that applications exclusive to the x86 editions of Windows won't run on ARM CPUs outside of DOSBox, and any Windows application old enough to work well in DOSBox is probably two decades old and made for Windows 3.1. But several Windows family operating systems do run on ARM: Windows CE, Windows Phone 7, Windows RT, and Windows Phone 8. I'm not aware of any Wine-alike project to run applications for these environments under GNU/Linux or Android on ARM.

The reason they were able to upgrade the Pi to 512MB is exactly because the 256MB - version was so popular. If there had not been such demand there still wouldn't be 512MB - version. So basically, you're annoyed because it is popular and therefore managed to get a discount -- rather illogical from your part.

It's not 1994 anymore, ram is dirt cheap. Putting in 512mb from the start SHOULD have been obvious at the design meeting, would not have added significant cost, and would not have fragmented the software base, as now there will be different version for stuff with differing amounts of ram.

The manufacturers weren't convinced there'd be enough demand for the Pi and therefore getting a deal for 512MB chips would indeed have increased the price of the device quite a bit. Also, your argument is like saying that they should never ever do upgraded versions of anything whatsoever because -- gee whiz! -- there will be new versions of stuff to make use of new possibilities!

The manufacturers weren't convinced there'd be enough demand for the Pi and therefore getting a deal for 512MB chips would indeed have increased the price of the device quite a bit.

I was not aware of this, do you have a link elaborating on that? Given that the VIA APC has 512 of ram and almost the same price I am slightly skeptical of this claim.

Also, your argument is like saying that they should never ever do upgraded versions of anything whatsoever because -- gee whiz! -- there will be new versions of stuff to make use of new possibilities!

No it is not like that at all. There IS such a thing as reving your product so often that nobody wants it, see Desktop Linux for proof of this. With a constantly shifting baseline, a good base of stable well developed software cannot be created because developers are constantly redeveloping for the new baseline. If the Pi was out for 2 yea

I was not aware of this, do you have a link elaborating on that? Given that the VIA APC has 512 of ram and almost the same price I am slightly skeptical of this claim.

Well, comparing VIA to the foundation behind the Pi is quite unfair as VIA is a large, established manufacturer with plants of their own; of course they can get deals with other manufacturers much more easily than a completely new entity that has no track record whatsoever and a questionable amount of financial resources to back up a deal with. Also, in VIA's case they themselves manufacture their own boards, the CPU, many of the connectors and so on, meaning that they can squeeze just that much more out of

Why exactly could they supposedly get the 256mb chips so easily as to make a $35 machine, but 512 would suddenly be a monumental hurdle? If you can get a deal one one, why not the other?

I am still interested in the assertion of 256 being chosen, because of problems getting bulk deals, being backed up. Perhaps a link to a forum discussion or something elaborating on why certain choices were made? I'd love to see the reasoning behind some of the design choices.

I'm going to have to agree with you on the too frequent of revisions issue. This is the third revision of the board in less than a year. If they were going to up the memory, they should have done it at the same time that they changed the motherboard layout.

At $35, you can do a lot more revisions than on a $100 or more device, as price is not really an issue. As you say, it is compatibility that is an issue with too many revisions. If the Pi Foundation were smart, they would shoot for a revision once

It uses LPDDR2 RAM in a Package-On-Package format where it sits on top of the SoC. The SoC only supports up to 512 MB of RAM, so if you want more you'll have to redesign the board and use a different SoC.

The next question then is why did they chose to use a POP chip if there would be such difficulty in acquiring them. I would assume that a POP design would allow things to be more compact while using cheaper, lower density chips would have decreased the costs of chips, might have increased the price of construction in other ways. I suppose the use of laptop memory was probably considered at some point and rejected for some reason.

I'm going to go with the AC sibling of mine. Android to me is a terrible operating system, I don't know enough about it to know whether it's better in newer versions (jellybean etc) or whether it's something specific to my phone and the phones I've seen, but Android isn't my idea of a good OS. I would much rather run Linux on the Raspberry Pi, and don't care to run Android. I only have an Android phone because there really isn't a whole lot else out there. iPhone is nice but expensive. Windows Phone is al

I suspect it is your phone mostly. The biggest problem Android has is that there is a huge quality range from phone to phone and manufacturer to manufacturer. The software and modifications that HTC, Motorola, and Samsung force on Android users are horrendous and lead to some absolutely horrible experiences with worse performance.

If you use the Android that Google releases (or something close to it, like Asus) there is a world of difference and (to me) a superior experience to iOS.

PC manufacturers have done this for years and have never learnt either.

Nothing better than a brand new PC that take 2 minutes to boot then 3 minutes for the HDD to settle down after login followed by a ton of nagware, reformat and reinstall and choose not to install he bloatware and the PC takes 40 seconds to boot and no HDD activity after a couple of seconds after login.

Except the Pi shipped with an ARM11 (ARMv6) CPU, while just about all native Android apps are compiled for ARMv7. So most of the apps people are going to want to run... Multimedia programs, games, Firefox, etc., etc, won't ever work on the Pi, all for the sake of saving $1 rather than upgrading to a non-ancient CPU.

It's a fully open platform so you don't need a compatibility layer (android) to get to secret hardware underneath. Android doesn't even have a fully working X yet so you are more limited in the applications that can run than if you run a compatible linux, bsd, or whatever.

I generally agree with you, but there could be many good reasons to run Android. It's certainly the better choice for touch-screens. And even on a desktop-like system, android apps are designed to be small and fast, while their desktop equivalents are nightmarish resource hogs. Firefox and Chrome are great examples of that. And while the source code of both is open, I've yet to see any lightweght desktop version being forked off.

Android has a number of applications that Linux lacks... Netflix streaming

My son is really interested in robotics and hardware stuff. Is there some site out there that has a list of components and accessories for sale (like robotic arms, led displays, etc.) that will work out of the box with Raspberry Pi's? I've seen a few of these for other prototyping hardware controllers, but the prices were a bit steep.

I ordered one, two months later they cancelled my order for no reason. Ordered another in July from RS, one month past so I went to Element14. Element14 delivered in 3 days, ordered a seconds one a couple of weeks later and that took 2 days. My second RS order from July still hasn't arrived.

My local Tesco has RPi for sale in the CPC (Farnell) section.

It reminded me how incompetent RS are. I used to make orders of components, used to take weeks for everything to arrive. Farnell can get

Here's a useful reference point: I ordered one from both element14 and RS at the same time. The RS one arrived several weeks after the one from element14. I ordered another one from element14 more recently, and it arrived in under 3 weeks.

AFAICT, most of the people complaining ordered theirs from RS. I suspect part of the reason may be that RS is using a completely separate website and therefore likely has a completely separate administrative process for fulfilling orders, which isn't as capable. Element14 just added them as items to their regular site, so they aren't subject to the same limitations. (I'd say that was a pretty good move on their part, given that I've since ordered lots of more obscure components from them.)

I have been reading Slashdot for fourteen years and I have never once complained about the grammar in a summary before (usually there are enough pedants out there to do more than enough complaining), but this summary is horrible. I do not blame the submitter because I realize that English may not be his or her first language, but I though Slashdot was supposed to have some sort of editors who at least read the summary once before posting it to the front page. I had to read the second sentence several times to confirm that it meant what I thought it did and in the rest of the summary the article "the" is missing at least two times. I really do love this site, but if you want to call yourself an editor, then please do the job or turn it over to someone who will.

I have been reading Slashdot for fourteen years and I have never once complained about the grammar in a summary before. Usually there are enough pedants out there to do more than enough complaining, but this summary is horrible. I do not blame the submitter because I realize that English may not be his or her first language, but I thought Slashdot was supposed to have some sort of editorial staff who at least read the summary once before posting it to the front page. I had to read the second sentence several times to confirm that it meant what I thought it did, and in the rest of the summary the article "the" is missing at least two times. I really do love this site, but if you want to call yourself an editor, then please do the job or turn it over to someone who will.

Hey, I upvoted the other sumission on this on the firehose, but expected this flamebait version to be accepted. And, predictabaly, there's a big thread debating the flamebait about the merits of being an early adopter (again...).

There are lots of arm dev boards. though none quite as cheap as the raspberry pi. for example I have had a beagleboard for several years, its a bit bigger (though still tiny by most standards), and quite a bit more expensive. If you want smaller you could look at gumstix. if you only need 8bit then arduino. if you want ubuntu support you could look at pandaboard. if you want a 16/64 core coprocessor then parallella.

Depending on your requirements, the Arduino board may be better for hardware work. The AVR microcontroller has much much lower specs than the R.Pi, but the electrical connections of Arduino are much better, with more pins and an ADC. R. Pi go out of their way to warn you about experimenting with the GPIO pins, because they are not protected and can fry your Pi. You can add something called a Gertboard to the Pi and that has a huge number of connections, but I couldn't figure out how to get one or if it was

If I needed network attached webcams for a short time, then a streaming video player for a short time, then an Arduino for a short time, I might get a Pi. But I can't see that scenario ever happening.

If I need an IP camera, I'll get an IP camera (or an old Android phone). If I need a streaming video player, I'll get one. And I will NEVER expect or desire to have one of the cross over and do the job of the other, cause I want them both.

It make make no sense to you, but it makes sense to me. If there are enough people to whom it makes sense and who are actually willing to spend their money and their time to get one the project makes sense, business sense.

Locating a source has been a problem due to demand and what appears to be limited production. I've periodically checked, but have not found it in stock yet.
But, I ordered 2 today while reading the comments here, and Newark's estimate is delivery this week. We shall see.

Well, that didn't take long. My order for 2 is back-ordered, not shipping until Oct 26.
NBD, but if an online retailer is going to bother posting any inventory counts on a product's page, and a customer places an order that *their system* states has N units "ready to ship", then just how does this become back-ordered?